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another breakfast with Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy
It is a brilliant east Texas morning, the kind that only comes around a few days per year, just often enough to keep everyone from packing up and leaving for a place with fewer chiggers and kissing cousins.
“I was thinking,” says Billy Wayne.
“Not again.” Answers Joe Eddy. “When has it ever gotten you anyplace but to another cup of coffee?”
Billy Wayne: “Be that as it may, I was thinking anyhow.”
Joe Eddy: “As long as you’re thinking, may as well put it out here for consumption. No sense it only infecting your brain.”
Joe Eddy pauses, looking at the passing waitress with the lovely curls and red lips. “Lucille, gonna need a warm-up.”
Lucille, magically with the pot, like some café fairy, “What? Has he been thinking again?”
Joe Eddy sighs and nods.
Billy Wayne, undeterred and unimpressed, continues, “I was thinking as I was on the exam table with my shirt open, getting the EKG treatment—nothing serious or new before you ask; just a checkup from the heart attack a couple years back—that maybe the point of life is simply to learn there is no point.”
Joe Eddy, visibly relieved this is not new heart news, answers wryly, “That seems pointless.”
Billy Wayne: “What? The thought?”
Joe Eddy: “Yeah.”
Billy Wayne: “Well, I suppose it is, which, if you think about it, makes the point.”
Joe Eddy: “How you reconcile that with a Sunday school lesson?”
Billy Wayne: “Well, I don’t exactly. Solomon already done it for me.”
Joe Eddy: “Did it for you.”
Billy Wayne: “Did I stutter?”
Joe Eddy: “Never mind. Go on.”
Billy Wayne: “Well, we recently studied Ecclesiastes in the small group I am assigned to at church, which, by the way, seems to be the mutterings of a deeply depressed soul.”
Joe Eddy: “Kind of agree from what I recall. It is not a Hallmark card, for sure.”
Billy Wayne: “Well, here’s the man we hail as the wisest of them all, prefacing what he is about to write with, ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher.’”
Joe Eddy: “You mix up your past tense ‘don’ts’ and ‘dids’ and then throw out a word like ‘prefacing.’ You are a miracle of modern madness.”
Joe Eddy, again: “Still, what was that thing Shakespeare wrote, ‘Much ado about nothing?’”
Billy Wayne: “I have wondered what an ado is?”
Joe Eddy raises a finger, then lifts his phone to his mouth, holding it like a microphone.
Joe Eddy: “Hey, Siri. What does the word ado mean?”
Siri, in a dismissive tone: “According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, ‘ado’ means ‘a state of noisy, confused activity’, as in a commotion.”
Billy Wayne: “Based on her tone, I don’t think she likes you much.”
Joe Eddy: “I think she picked up on it from listening to my wife.”
Billy Wayne: “I think we lost our way. What were we even discussing?”
Joe Eddie: “Nothing. Look at the time.”
Lucille, having fluttered by from her nearby perch, where she effortlessly eavesdrops on every conversation in every corner of the diner, which is her other superpower to go along with impeccable coffee top-off timing, says, “You knuckleheads were dragging poor defenseless geniuses from bygone eras—Solomon and Shakespeare no less—into your trifling about whether life has meaning and we still ain’t decided and here you are quitting on the subject.”
Billy Wayne sighs and grabs his Stetson off the adjacent chair, affixes it to his head, cocked to the right the way he likes it.
“I reckon there’s always tomorrow,” he deadpans.
“Until there isn’t,” quips Joe Eddy.
Lucille: “Whose turn is it to pay?”
Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy in perfect unison: “His.”
Author’s Note
Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy are characters inspired by two men I saw one morning while having coffee with my grandfather. Billy Wayne is a tall, rugged Texas farmer, and Joe Eddie is a stout, meaty businessman. Lucille the Waitress could easily fit into any roadside diner. Since they are fictional, I reserve the right to put them into any era, but always in the morning over coffee with Lucille attending to them. Here is the first in the series, if you want context.
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